Bioinformatics And Genetics

Running head: BIOINFORMATICS AND GENETICS
BIOINFORMATICS AND GENETICS
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BIOINFORMATICS AND GENETICS1
Question 1
1. Bioinformatics is a field of study which interprets biological information using a
combination of subjects like biology, informatics engineering, computer science, statistic
and mathematics. Computational biology on the other hand, is a subject were biologists
use biology based data for the development of algorithms so as to understand the
relationships between various biological systems. Data science is the field of using a
combination of statistics, information technology and statistical methods in order to
interpret and analysis quantitative data.1
2. A gene is the most basis functional and physical form of hereditary information. Proteins
are known as the body’s building blocks and muscle building and repairing nutrients.
Genome means a group of chromosomes which are present in every cell of an organism.
A transcriptome are messenger RNA molecules which are expressed by any organism. A
proteome defines a complete group of proteins which are expressed by organisms, tissues
and cells. Genomics is the subject of studying the genomes of a organism.2
3. Comparative genomics is a subject where genomes from various organisms are
researched and compared with each other. Metagenomics is a field where genetic
materials extracted from the environment are researched. The Earth Genome Project is a
program where all the genomes of Earth’s species will be catalogued and sequences
within the next 10 years.3
1 Ranganathan, Shoba, Kenta Nakai, and Christian Schonbach. Encyclopedia of Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology: ABC of Bioinformatics. Elsevier, 2018.
2 Davalos, Veronica, Anna Martinez-Cardus, and Manel Esteller. "The epigenomic revolution in breast
cancer: from single-gene to genome-wide next-generation approaches." The American journal of pathology 187, no.
10 (2017): 2163-2174.
3 Lewis, Ricki. Human Genetics: The Basics. Garland Science, 2016.

BIOINFORMATICS AND GENETICS2
4. A genetic code is triplet means that it can code of 64 combinations in sets of 4 x 4 x 4
after which, this information can be used by DNA to express the placement of 20
essential amino acids. According to the Chargaff’s rule, the ratio of pyrimidine and
purine bases in every DNA should be 1:1 and the amounts of adenine to thymine and
guanine to cytosine should be equal. According to the nucleotide colinearity rule, one
sequence of nucleotides should be arranged in a linear order same as that of another
sequence. The wobble position effect can be seen in a codon’s 3rd nucleotide where the
bind between the mRNA and tRNA does not follow Watson-Crick base pairing.4
5. Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is a programme for finding similarity
between the local regions present in a nucleotide or protein sequences and some of its
types include: Primer-BLAST, SmartBlast, Protein Blast, Nucleotide BLAST, igBLAST
and MOLE-BLAST.5
6. Clustal Omega suite is a programme which can be used to produce alignments between
three sequences or more and its types of output formats include: ClustalW with character
counts, NEXUS, ClustalW, SELEX, STOCKHOLM, VIENNA etc.6
7. The National Center for Biotechnology Information is an organization which provides
information on biomedical sciences, health and genomics. ExPASy is a research portal
which provides access to various scientific and biology based databases. The EBI is a
European based laboratory which specializes in life sciences. The Conserved Domains
and Protein Classification provides a collection of alignment models of multiple
sequences for proteins of full length as well as ancient domains. The VEuPathDB is an
4 Chevance, Fabienne FV, and Kelly T. Hughes. "Case for the genetic code as a triplet of
triplets." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 18 (2017): 4745-4750.
5 Shah, Nidhi, Michael G. Nute, Tandy Warnow, and Mihai Pop. "Misunderstood parameter of NCBI
BLAST impacts the correctness of bioinformatics workflows." Bioinformatics 35, no. 9 (2019): 1613-1614.
6 Sievers, Fabian, and Desmond G. Higgins. "Clustal Omega for making accurate alignments of many
protein sequences." Protein Science 27, no. 1 (2018): 135-145.